Zuki's Quest - a turn based Puzzle Platformer

Although I understand that piracy can be alarming, the piracy aspect of this isn't the root of the problem. Those pirated IAP's probably come from the Far East, and if you clamp down, you'll certainly reduce piracy, but you aren't going to see appreciably better revenue.

Fixing this requires taking a hard look at the "sales" funnel and at the larger game to see whether the IAP is a fit for the game. During testing, have friends and family play through the demo and then ask them at the end whether they'd buy it based on what they've seen. Evaluate whether you are providing the right ratio of free to paid content. When the demo finishes and the paywall goes up, is the player hooked to your game and feels a *need* to pay to see what's next? It's these sort of processes you need to think through.

Yes Jon your right, piracy is not a problem, it's our sales strategy that needs improvement.

Blog post: Why the monetization in Zuki's Quest has failed. Download & sales stats included.

http://www.tinytouchtales.com/why-the-monetization-in-zukis-quest-has-failed/

Thanks for the post and information! Even if you didn't make a ton of money off the game, it must be refreshing to be recognized by Apple and you learned what to do next time.

thank for sharing .my game just 10 DL . 

but fighting .learning and go on   

The definition of irony: on one of the sites offering a hack for Zuki's Quest, the hacker makes an indignant statement telling people that they must credit him for the hack and, "DO NOT STEAL THIS HACK"!

to be honest, if i were 14 now, i would hack the shit out of my jailbroken ipod for sure . we did it back then with pc and playstation and now the kids do it with ios and android. i don't blame them, its mainly our inexperience of how to sell a mobile game.

I don't have anything against jailbreaking except using it to hack apps and get them for free. But that's a big reason and it's why I often warm people not to do it because there are developers who are really hurt by this sort of thing.

It's pretty uncool to not be able to support your family or keep making games because some jerks decided they didn't want to pay.

That being said though, it will always be an issue so we just have to work around it.

Hi,

I was wondering what you used to track your own iAP counter ?
Also read your blog post and was wondering what was the experience with prMac ?
What did they do for you, do you think using this pr firm helped boost your visibility ?

Also curious on how changing your price will affect your downloads and revenue....

Thanks for all the good info, and keep on going you seem to be well on track to be an established Indie gam dev

so for tracking i have my own little php backend. everytime a purchase succeds i send a http post to the server, where i store it in a mysql database. prmac is a very good service for spreading wide. so you will reach a lot of press but chances to get picked up because of that are low. we had way better experience with writing the standard personal email. this time we had a really good pr hook, because "turn based puzzle platformer" is something press does not see every day.

i will do a follow up after christmas, for sure.

Thanks for the answer

I had no idea people where hacking iAPs as well ?  In my mind the freemium games where defeating the jailbroken users because somehow the apps purchases would not be allowed since the game download would not have been registered... anyways it looks like I am uninformed

I am not sure I understand what you mean to say about the PR firm.. are they only giving you service if they feel the product is unique ?  Or you are saying different sites are only reading the "spam" of the PR firms if they see something valuable ?

Thanks

I am not sure I understand what you mean to say about the PR firm.. are they only giving you service if they feel the product is unique ?  Or you are saying different sites are only reading the "spam" of the PR firms if they see something valuable ?

Thanks

Well mobile app PR organizations get a ton of requests for reviews so they don't do all of them. Instead they often pick the best and most unique games. They aren't going to review 20 calculator apps but if one of them has some unique feature they might review  it.

no this one just takes your self created pr text and publishes it to its contacts. it costs $22 and every dev can use it.

Can you use that site with paid apps for advertising?

100,000 hits or downloads seems like an awful lot for ios in two weeks

Exposure grows exponentially as you climb up the list. If it showed up under New and Noteworthy (it did) and placed in the top 25 in the US store, that's not an impossible figure to hit.

All the more impressive because this was largely organic and wasn't promoted through something with a captive userbase like FAAD.

Even though the game hasn't monetized great so far, the large userbase it has provides some opportunities to cross promote future titles, especially if you refresh this game to include seasonal content, so they see that cross promotion in the first place.